— Seth Godin, via The Domino Project

I’m 42 this year. ‘Old’ by a lot of people’s standards: young entrepreneurs who have the capacity for and/or absence of obligation that allows them to work 16 hour days while partying for the remaining eight; and investors who expect to see gigantic goals kicked by peeps my age.

Nonetheless I have been sitting on a process I devised in 2008 that is now of its time. If I don’t at least attempt to make this happen there will be regret.

The last time I looked at an industry from the outside, not knowing how it actually works, I felt excited, daunted and humbled. I feel the same way today, albeit tempered with a little wisdom.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

* I worked 15 years in the music biz, six concurrently in book publishing and two concurrently in online ‘new media’ publishing (as it was back then).

But the problem with being a problem solver is that everything’s a problem, and that clearly is a problem …

— Seth Godin via Seth’s Blog

Besides, I much rather Klouchebag. Now that’s real :-)

I think it unwise to ignore these chance events.

Pitching has been time consuming and difficult.* Not necessarily because my pitch isn’t good (although there’s room for improvement) but because what I’m doing is groundbreaking. There is no point of comparison.

Until now.

I recently found a start-up in San Francisco somewhat in the space I’m occupying. They received ~$1 million backing from a well known VC firm and several equally well known individuals. They’ve had buyout offers from Valley institutions.

So to be able to say that the business I’m building is, “[name] turned up to 11″, makes getting this off the ground just that little bit easier. It is a joy to have a competitor.

* Being in Australia probably isn’t helping my cause on this one. Time to relocate the family to SV.

— Lao Tzu

Hollywood and Silicon Valley are like two ships passing in the night. They are not trading passengers. They speak a different jargon; they have grown up with completely different models for how to grow a business, for how to attract and retain employees, for everything. They’ve grown up with completely different role models, and so the people think entirely differently. I mean, when you’re in Silicon Valley, you don’t have to explain Silicon Valley to anyone else because everybody’s here and understands it. And the same is evidently true of Hollywood–neither side can explain themselves to the other very well at all.

These are parallel universes that have less in common than one would think. What I like in Silicon Valley is to hang out with the engineers. What I like about the people I’ve met from Hollywood are the creative people. They’re the heart of Hollywood, not the people driving around in their Mercedes SLs talking on their cellular phones and making deals, the agents and stuff; I couldn’t care less about that–that’s not Hollywood to me.

The part of Hollywood that we have attracted [at Pixar] is the creative side, the creative talent. We value that exactly equally with the technical talent.

— Steve Jobs, June 1995

Like I said in my last post and in October ’11 …

Source: FastCompany: Steve Jobs highlights

There’s been a lot written about the passing of Steve Jobs. Probably too much, from people who knew too little.

Not enough recognition has been given to the fact that a guy out of Silicon Valley built the most important animation studio since Disney and in doing so created a Hollywood powerhouse.

Brent Schlender at FastCompany continues the theme that Jobs’ defining years were the ones that many consider to have been spent in the wilderness. (Steve Jobs: Into the wild.)

Having been there myself I can state with some certainty that “the wilderness” isn’t anything of the sort. But one certainly gains new perspectives and a maturity that only comes from taking the time to truly reflect upon one’s purpose.

From Rocky Agrawal in his VentureBeat opinion piece, Why Groupon is poised for collapse.

I’ve talked before about how important it is for managers to understand the sector in which they’re really operating. This is no different for consumers looking to game a system, or entrepreneurs aiming to invent an entirely new one.

[Note: if you read the Rocky Agrawal piece, factor that he seems to have a philosophical opposition to group buying. Much of what he discusses in the article can be fixed via business model adjustments. Groupon is a work-in-progress, but it's also a stock I would never buy ... unless I intended to short it.]

Copyright © Brent Lewin/Bloomberg

Infographic by MDG Advertising

A journalist takes a sample of polluted red water from the Jianhe River in Luoyang, Henan province, China, on December 13, 2011. According to local media, the sources of the pollution were two illegal chemical plants discharging their production wastewater into the rain sewer pipes. (Reuters/China Daily)

A worker looks at a photographer from the door of a factory that manufactures screws and nuts, next to a polluted river in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, China, on March 15, 2012. China failed to meet its own targets for cleaning its air and water in 2011. (Reuters/Stringer)